"Black soldiers played a crucial—also inadequately appreciated—role in winning Latin American independence, and nowhere more so than in Cuba. Many thanks to Mark A. Sanders for giving Ricardo Batrell’s rare and remarkable testimony a vigorous, well-contextualized, and carefully-annotated voice in English." —John Charles Chasteen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "In an anticolonial army that was primarily black, Ricardo Batrell ... Read morewas one of only two black soldiers to write his own memoir of Cuba’s final War of Independence, the riveting story of his experience as a black soldier in a war that mobilized thousands of black men and that profoundly challenged racial hierarchies and assumptions. It is also a moving account of Batrell’s sense of betrayal as the promise of that movement gave way to U.S. intervention. An unusual and wonderfully rich source, available now more widely thanks to Mark Sanders’s lively and most welcome translation." —Ada Ferrer, NYU Show Less